Scaling Yourself
Last week, MixPanel published an e-book on How To Grow As A Product Leader. The book is a collection of interviews with Max Levchin, Rand Fishkin, Danielle Morrill, Hunter Walk, and Steven Sinofsky who have candidly talked about their successes and failures (aka learnings). This blog post is about one of my learnings from the interview with Steven Sinofsky.
Steven Sinofsky talks about scaling yourself as a Product Leader as you simultaneously scale the product. As you go up the ladder and become a product leader, you stop being the one responsible for detecting the trends and patterns based on your past experiences and solving every little problem. Instead, you should focus on building the team - giving them the tools and creating a process or framework for them to grow. You’ve got to learn to resist the urge to copy and paste versions of yourself into that roles you’ve held in the path.
Scaling yourself means relinquishing control - you’ve got to learn to let go in order to grow.
In doing so, you’re letting your team discover patterns on their own and in the process learn a lot from them as well. While this may be really hard or even sound wrong at first, it is an inevitable step as you transition from an Individual Contributor to a Product Leader.
Kaushik Rangadurai
Code. Learn. Explore